


lost in the woods

by ProbablyVoldemort



Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-15
Updated: 2020-08-15
Packaged: 2021-03-06 05:47:04
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,888
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25908340
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ProbablyVoldemort/pseuds/ProbablyVoldemort
Summary: Murphy can read minds, but only sometimes.  It doesn't help him not get lost on a class hiking trip.
Comments: 2
Kudos: 17
Collections: Chopped 3.0 Round 4





	lost in the woods

**Author's Note:**

> Chopped Finals Bitches!!
> 
> This was written in literally an hour and a half because I didn't have enough time to finish my actual fic. I'm kinda digging the general concept though so I might turn it into something better later. We'll see
> 
> Theme: Young Adult
> 
> Tropes:  
> \- El Dorado  
> \- Frikdreina  
> \- Telepathy  
> \- Secret Trope Which Will Be Revealed In The End Notes
> 
> Title is from the hit single by Kristoff, Lost In The Woods, because I also ran out of time to properly choose a title.
> 
> This is so bad omg. Please enjoy it's terrible ness

Murphy could read minds.

It wasn't a constant thing, wasn't even really a regular thing. It was just occasionally and out of nowhere.

He didn't know why it started. Or how. Or any of the specifics. He just knew that last Tuesday he woke up to the sound of his dog pleading with him to give her a treat.

So he could read minds. But only sometimes.

And, more often than not, he could read Clarke Griffin's mind.

Which was what was happening now, as he was trying to concentrate on his calculus test and all he could hear was Clarke trying to decide if she should wear her purple leggings or her green leggings on the hiking trip tomorrow.

"Shut up about your stupid leggings," Murphy muttered under his breath, kicking the back of Clarke's chair for emphasis. She turned around to stare at him for a moment until Mr. Pike sent Indra into Clarke's line of vision to sign at her to turn her eyes back to her own paper.

And then Clarke went back to sketching an admittedly lifelike portrait of the back of Jasper's head on the back of her finished test and Murphy went back to trying to tune out her thoughts while also doing trigonometry.

Why couldn't he have gotten into Clarke's mind when she was actually writing the stupid test? If he was going to have to read people's thoughts occasionally, he should at least be able to cheat at math.

Clarke's thoughts returned to her outfit for the hiking trip and Murphy rolled his eyes and tried to tune it out so he could at least try to pass this course.

When the bell rang, Murphy bumped his arm against Clarke's as everyone jostled out of the classroom. She was thinking about her leggings again. The least he could do with this dumb superpower he now apparently had was help her out with her fashion dilemmas.

"Green," he signed, smirking at her confusion. "They make your butt look great." He ran off for his locker before she could smack him, her indignation and confusion echoing in his thoughts.

The next morning, Murphy arrived at school before the asscrack of dawn, half asleep and planning to catch up on his missed sleep for the next nine hours of their drive.

But then he was startled awake by the sight of a great looking butt in some bright green leggings.

It was too early for anything, but it was definitely way too early to get hounded by Clarke about how he knew she was trying to decide her leggings, so he headed straight for the bus, managing a grimace in response to Kane's too energetic greeting for negative seven hundred o'clock in the morning.

He was almost asleep when the rest of the class piled onto the bus at Jaha's shouted reminder to sit with your group, please and thank you. Murphy groaned when Clarke dropped next to him and smacked him in the shoulder, mourning the loss of what would have been a very long and very satisfying nap.

He was, of course, in Clarke's group for the trip. Indra wasn't coming because it was her daughter's sixth birthday or something, so Clarke wouldn't have an interpreter for the week long hiking and camping trip. It was fine, really, because Jaha was more or less fluent in ASL, having known Clarke since she was a baby, and there were enough of them that were fluent that it would work.

Which brought him back to Clarke's group.

His mom, before the alcohol and the abuse kicked in, had been Clarke and Wells's joint nanny. Which meant that Murphy had been forced to hang out with them when his grab hadn't been available to watch him. And then even when his gran had been available to babysit, he and Clarke and, to a lesser degree, Wells had gotten a little codependent, so he’d eventually become a regular fixture at his mom’s side.

So he’d been there for the ASL lessons, learned it as he learned English, and was, aside from Clarke herself and Wells, probably the most fluent.

So he was in Clarke’s group. As was Wells. Bellamy had put in a lot of effort in their early years of elementary school so he could better argue with her, and Murphy wasn’t personally aware of Raven and Harper’s motives, but they were fluent enough to be in the designated ASL group.

Which apparently meant he was stuck with Clarke as a seatmate for the next nine hours, which basically meant he could kiss his nap goodbye. For a Deaf girl who didn’t actually speak, Clarke really didn’t shut up.

“Why did you tell me to wear the green leggings?” she asked him, her hands somehow moving in an accusatory manner.

Murphy rolled his eyes. “They make your butt look good,” he repeated his reasoning from the day before, which earned him the smack he’d managed to avoid yesterday. Kane started monologuing at the front of the bus about safety and don’t have sex in tents and blah blah blah, Jaha interpreting beside him, so Murphy motioned for Clarke to slouch down so they couldn’t be chewed out for signing instead of listening.

“How did you know I couldn’t decide?” she rephrased, and Murphy sighed.

“Because I can read minds,” he deadpanned, and Clarke stared at him for a second before snorting.

“Sure,” she agreed, sarcastic, and then scooted back up at the seat to watch Jaha’s safety speech.

Which led to now.

Maybe Murphy should have listened to Jaha and Kane’s safety speech. Maybe he just _shouldn’t_ have listened to Bellamy and his dumb declaration that there was something cool in the woods right over there. Maybe he should have stayed home and not come on this trip at all.

But now here he was, stuck in the woods with no sign of the path they were supposed to be on or the other groups they were supposed to be with.

“Shit,” Clarke signed, once it was decided that they were well and truly lost.

Murphy echoed the sentiment, both with his hands and his mouth.

They wandered around for a few more hours, the sun sinking lower and lower in the sky. They had their food and their tents, so they weren’t completely at a loss, but being completely lost in the woods was bad enough.

Wells thought they should stay where they were, that someone would come eventually. Raven thought that was bullshit and that they should try to at least find the parking lot with the bus again. Raven beat Wells in their arm wrestle, so they tried to find the parking lot.

Murphy, meanwhile, was wishing that his dumb telepathy would pick up on something other than Clarke’s thoughts, which were the same as the words she was signing and the ones that the others were saying out loud.

“This isn’t even fucking helpful,” he snapped, and everyone turned to look at him. He sighed, figuring that being lost in the fucking woods was as good a time as any to tell them. “I can read minds, but all I’m getting right now is Clarke’s.”

It was, of course, a completely ridiculous declaration that needed proof. So they spent their dinner break having him prove he could hear Clarke’s thoughts.

“Now she’s thinking that we should probably set up camp before it gets to dark,” he finished, which was also, coincidentally, what he was thinking.

Bellamy was deemed water filterer, as the reason they’d gotten lost in the first place, so it was up to Murphy and Wells to set up the guys’ tent on their own.

And then, eventually, after they’d had a fire and stayed up as late as they could keep their eyes open, they were all falling asleep in their sleeping bags, and Murphy was listening to Clarke’s thoughts of whether they’d ever find the rest of their class again.

Murphy froze in his tracks, and then fell on his face when Wells didn’t stop in time and crashed into his back.

“I hear something,” he said. “In my head.”

The others were stopping then, Raven signing to Clarke what was happening, and Murphy was closing his eyes, trying to tune into the voice.

It was a girl who was in the middle of an argument with someone who’d left the toilet seat up.

“Toilet seat?” Bellamy repeated, after Murphy had relayed the information. “There’s nowhere that should have a toilet seat around for miles.”

But that was what he was hearing. And, if he concentrated hard enough, he could tell the direction they were coming from.

It was a short discussion, because there was really only one answer. Either they continued wandering aimlessly and hoped they’d eventually reach the parking lot or their class, or they headed in the direction of people with toilet seats and, hopefully, a phone.

Murphy was pretty sure he’d died and gone to heaven, because that was the only reason he could be seeing what he was seeing.

It was gold. An entire city made of gold, rising out of the middle of a forest in Nowhere, Canada.

“What the fuck,” Harper said, and Murphy had to agree.

They went into the city after a discussion—Wells and Harper were team This Is A Horror Movie Scenario And We’re Gonna Die, while everyone else was team These People Probably Have A Phone Or At Least Knowledge Of Where The Parking Lot Is.

They were fed golden food and golden wine—apparently the golden city didn’t have a drinking age. They were led to golden beds in golden rooms.

And then Clarke was there, in her fleece pyjamas she’d brought because it was cold in tents, standing in his doorway.

“I'm in love with you,” she signed, and then the wall exploded.

It was aliens, coming out of the sky and attacking the city.

Raven flew up to the blown up wall on the back of a unicorn, and motioned for them to jump on.

And then Bellamy flew past on a Pegasus, shooting rainbows and flowers out of his hands.

“We have to jump!” Raven yelled as they approached the alien leader, and Murphy turned around to interpret it to Clarke.

And then he was jumping into the alien’s mouth, falling down down down—

The bus hit a bump, and Murphy startled awake.

“Where are we?” he signed, after elbowing Clarke to take her attention away from her book.

She glanced down at her watch. “About an hour from the trail head,” she told him, and Murphy sunk down in his seat.

It was a dream. It was all a dream. He couldn’t read minds. There wasn’t a gold city in the middle of the forest. Bellamy couldn’t shoot rainbows and flowers out of his hands.

He settled back into his seat, nodding to himself. Everything was normal and fine and he would make sure that Bellamy wouldn’t lead them off into getting lost.

Everything was fine.

And then he was watching a half-baked fantasy of the dragon battle going on in Clarke’s book, the fight exploding silently through his head.

Okay. Maybe the mind reading was somehow not a dream.

But that was fine.

Everything would be fine.

**Author's Note:**

> Secret Trope: It Was All A Dream
> 
> Because I didn't have time to finish as I, again, wrote this entire fic in like an hour and a half. Which you can definitely tell.
> 
> And now I'm realizing that that trope doesn't actually exist on the list so the new final trope is Poorly Timed Confession. Because having tropes that don't exist is on brand with this mess.
> 
> Let me know if y'all would be interested in a non-dream version of this fic in which actual plot actually happens lol
> 
> Vote for me!


End file.
